Middle click paste is a very useful feature for a lot of people, but new linux users are not those people.
I personally switched two years ago, and got several people I know to switch too. Everyone I know who switched (including me) was confused by middle click paste.
It’s a hard to intuitively understand action (took me several months until I understood it took the selection for some reason) that is very easy to trigger accidentally, and that duplicates existing functionality.
The people who like it already know it exists, and could just toggle it on.
Of course, on distros not aimed at beginners, like say, debian, it should remain the default.
No it doesn’t, because middle-click paste doesn’t interfere with any other function. There’s no downside to having it.
My mom kept accidently pressing the mouse button, I could never figure it out why, when I was watching I guess shed be conscious and use it properly, but complain later that things get pasted randomly. After I disabled middle click, she hasn’t complained.
I’ll also admit that I’ve been struggling to figure out why when I middle mouse click to open a new tab, that it opens a new tab that searches what was previously on my clipboard. It never occurred to me that middle click pasted outside of the terminal until I started seeing posts about the Firefox news
That’s not a problem with middle click paste, that’s a problem with Firefox. If you hit ctrl+v in Firefox does it search for whatever is in your clipboard? No, so why should it do that when you paste by mouse click?
… I actually like being able to copy a website and middle clicking to open it. I don’t think it’s a problem, it just needs to be telegraphed to the user better, and togleable.
I think pasting directly into “search and go” if you middle click in a browser is certifiably insane.
Maybe acceptable as “paste and go” if it recognizes the clipboard contents as a valid URL.
Meh, I actively use it. I get why it might be unintuitive to someone newly switching.